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You work hard to bring traffic to your website. You invest money in online marketing strategies such as search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, social media and more. However, many basic issues will drive people away from your website and lower conversion. Luckily, many of these problems can be corrected with a bit of work.  Take a look at our top 10 list of reasons people leave, and some simple solutions:

1. Your site takes too long to load. Look, we’re all busy people; if a customer has to wait longer than a few seconds for a page to load, they’ll most likely leave. A good first place to check is Webmaster Tools – it takes just a few minutes to enable it for your website. You’ll be able to discover issues such as missing pages and broken links as Google crawls your site. Google also has some great tools to find issues associated with page speed – you can find a list of rules under “documentation” on this page. These include minifying CSS (i.e. compressing the files), combining external files, enabling browser caching and webpage compression. Yahoo also has a list of best practices to improve site speed. These include using high-quality web hosting, removing or updating any missing pages and links, and incorporating style sheets that load more efficiently.

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A Mother’s Day classic is serving breakfast in bed. However, not everyone lives with Mom. In fact, most people live too far from Mom  to celebrate the day in person. Because of this, Mother’s Day is one of the most important ecommerce sales holidays of the year. Its seasonal sales volume is second only to the Christmas and Hanukkah season.

Last year, Mother’s Day sales reached $14.6 billion with the average consumer spending about $127 on gifts. Every year children of all ages and plenty of adults buy gifts to show appreciation for their mothers. Popular gifts include food, jewelry, flowers, gift cards and clothing. Millions of Americans are rushing to get their gifts for Mom delivered by May 8th, 2011. You can help many of these people sleep better at night by following our tips below.

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An ecommerce business doesn’t achieve success overnight. Generally a website will have several growth spurts during its lifetime, each requiring a different push to get to the next level. The exact process will vary across industries and product-types, but there are essentially 3 macro-stages:

• No existing website
• Existing website, low traffic
• Existing website, high traffic

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With advances in digital technologies, marketing via email has become an essential activity for any business. Unlike traditional mail, emails can be delivered immediately to customers to provide information about products and promotions without the additional overhead of paper, printing and postage for brochures and other promotional materials. However, email is only effective when utilizing best-practices designed to target customers with relevant information, using engaging language and design to increase the percentage of recipients who open them (i.e. your “open rate”), read them and click through to your website.

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If your business is only converting 1 or 2% of its online shoppers, you are not alone. On average, 98% of people who visit a website will not make a purchase. However, the more shocking statistic involves people who initiate the checkout process – two out of 3 online shoppers will put an item into the cart but exit the website before completing the purchase. This is known as shopping cart abandonment. Luckily, there are ways to optimize the checkout process to reduce abandonment and significantly increase conversion.

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Internet marketing is a valuable and necessary part of any e-commerce strategy. There are various marketing techniques ranging from email newsletters to partnering with online affiliates and it is important to understand the available options to select those that are right for your company. At ECommerce Partners, we tend to focus on the marketing channels that yield the most immediate return on investment for e-commerce websites. For example, it makes more sense to explore search engine optimization and email database segmentation before putting resources into social media, as the ROI from traffic sources like Facebook and Twitter can be a challenge to quantify. In this article, we drill down to the basics that should be at the core of almost any e-commerce website’s marketing strategy.

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As convenient as it may be, it’s unrealistic to believe an e-commerce website can be developed overnight and start the revenue producing a few days in. Website development is a long-term process including design, content creation and a well-implemented structure that requires extensive development and testing. However, while your website structure is in development, there are other ways to begin generating traffic before the official launch.

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Avoiding the Rush

Consumer taste has long been finicky, erratic and trendy. However, while styles and products may change frequently, shopping patterns on the other hand tend to be more recognizable and often consistent. For example, every year, you may predict sales are going to boom in the November/December months. Smart marketing  involves preparing for seasonality and understanding your company’s patterns to know exactly what to promote and when to execute.

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The Temptation

Many enterprises both big and small believe the best time to start budget planning is in January. By then, they reason, they’ll have the ability to analyze sales and marketing statistics over the past year and adjust financial planning accordingly. However, in this scenario, companies lose valuable time that could have been spent implementing the e-commerce strategy carved out of an already prepared budget.

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Have you ever taken a break from holiday shopping to analyze what big retailers do to turn Black Friday weekend into the year’s best figures? We’ll examine some of the big retailer’s success stories, letting you in on their secret tricks that can work for practically any company budget. Despite a sluggish economy, U.S. retailers are still finding new ways to gain profits in the quarter 4 boom.

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